Corporate Research Associates’ latest poll is in line with polls by MQO and Abacus.
The table below shows CRA’s quarterly poll results since the last provincial election with the CRA “decideds” skew taken out.
Liberals are at 50% of all respondents, with the Conservatives at 16% and the NDP at seven with 26% undecided or giving no answer.
The only winner in the debate was David Cochrane.
He’s no Paul Wells but he did a fine job of wrangling the three leaders.
And that’s the problem for the politicians.
Real people were talking about the fact the neutral guy didn’t frig up like the guy on the other network. The other folks – all the party h’acktivists on Twitter - were just talking about how their guy won, which they were saying before the thing started.
If debates matter at all in Canadian elections, this one was a must win for Earle McCurdy or Paul Davis. They needed to score big points on Dwight Ball in order to stand even a vague hope of shifting a few votes in the last week of the campaign.
Neither did.
Muskrat Falls has been the big issue in two successive elections.
In 2011, the parties wanted to talk about the project, while voters didn’t. It never showed up in the list of any Top Five issues for voters.
The parties wanted to talk about Muskrat Falls because it was something they all agreed on. The 2011 election was a good example of an election in which the three parties ignored what the voters wanted to talk about and chattered instead among themselves.
Well, in 2015, Muskrat Falls and its impact on the economy is a huge issue but none of the parties want to talk about it. The best they’ve done is insist that non-existent export sales will help keep electricity prices low. It wasn’t true in 2011 and it certainly is nonsense now.
Another Muskrat Falls issue turned up recently and it could prove to be one of the most significant things so far.
The only people who think this is a dull election don’t know anything about politics.
Seriously.
On the day before nominations closed for candidates, the governing provincial Conservatives admitted on Thursday that they probably won’t have a full slate of candidates. Reporters were quick to remind everyone that we haven’t seen that situation since 1972.
That was the year the Conservatives won a majority government and put an end to 23 years of uninterrupted rule by the Liberals under Joe Smallwood. That was also the first time since Confederation that we’d had a change of political party governing the province. The second one of the two in the 20th century came in 1989.
Think about that for a second. In the 40 years after Confederation we changed governing parties precisely twice. Come December we will have done precisely the same thing within the first 15 years of the new century.
While the townie media are clamouring for details from people who don’t have the details, it’s important to look at what the people with the details are saying.
CBC’s Ramona Deering had Premier Paul Davis all to herself for a minute on CBC Radio’s Crosstalk.
She asked him what the current provincial deficit is.
“Hard to put a number on that,” said Davis just before launching into a long-winded rambling yack in order to run even further away from the simple question.
In his major interview with NTV on the first weekend of the formal provincial election campaign, Premier Paul Davis insisted that his party was not the same as the federal Conservatives.
Then he argued that Liberal Dwight Ball would not be able to represent the province’s interest in Ottawa because the Liberal leader would not be able to challenge the Liberal prime minister, who Davis referred to as Ball’s “boss.”
It was a classic Conservative ploy to resort to fear.
Fear a Liberal government, Davis warned. Bad things will happen.
Ryan Cleary told a gaggle of reporters that the prospect of a Liberal government in Ottawa and a Liberal government in St. John’s kept him awake at night.
More fear.
Then we got the hat-trick of fear. While the other two were pretty much par for the course, the third one was a gob-smacker..
If the polls are right, we could be looking at an unprecedented shift in politics in Newfoundland and Labrador.
We could be looking at lots of things but it’s a useful exercise to put a bunch of ideas on the table. That’s about the only way you can tease out rends that others won’t see.
What can we say about these polls?
A third poll has confirmed that the provincial Liberals have the support of an overwhelming majority of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.
74% of decided and leaning respondents said they would vote Liberal if an election was held tomorrow. 17% said they would vote Conservative, while only nine percent chose the New Democratic Party.
Asked who they thought would be the best Premier, 36% chose Liberal Dwight Ball, 24% chose Conservative Premier Paul Davis but only six percent chose NDP leader Earle McCurdy.
The provincial election campaign is barely a week old and already we have seen certain themes and interpretations emerging that are the product not of fact and observation but of invention.
The most striking one is the imagined explanation for the massive Liberal lead revealed through two polls released at the start of the campaign. Already we have commentators in local media connect the Liberal lead to the recent federal election. They call it the “Trudeau Effect.”
Political scientist Amanda Bittner told a CBC audience on Tuesday night that because the poll came on the heels of the federal election “it’s hard to say what is going on there.” She then talked in the abstract about what potential impacts the poll results might have on voters.
This is a bizarre comment on several levels.
If you want to get a sense of how accurate polls were in the last federal election take a look at the ones we have in public and compare those to the actual result on polling day.
In each of the tables below, we are using the official vote for each party as a share of eligible vote. Basically, that’s what the pollsters surveyed. They asked people who were eligible to vote what they would do.
Over the past couple of weeks, some people have been questioning the accuracy of public opinion polls.
People have questioned the polls in the federal election, especially after the defeat of two candidates in metro St. John’s a lot of people thought would win. The two polls released last week show the Liberals with such a commanding lead that some people – especially Conservative and New Democrat supporters are doubting the accuracy of the polls.
If you are a Conservative and think the Conservatives should be doing better, then you may be disappointed by what follows. But if you are interested in a better understanding of polls and what you are seeing in public, then read on. You should always look closely at public opinion polls to make sure you understand what you are looking at.
On Day Two of the official provincial general election campaign, a new poll by a different polling method lines up with the Abacus Data poll. In both Abacus and Forum Research, results are shown for decideds and leanings.
Forum goes farther than others, though, by showing demographic breakdowns of the responses. The Telegram had the poll first.
In the party choice question, Liberals dominate ever age category. The narrowest gap is in the 65+ group where the Liberals have 55% of support compared to the Conservatives 33%. In the 18-34 cohort, Liberals hold a commanding lead with the support of 70% of respondents. The Conservatives and New Democrats have the support of 16% and 14% of respondents respectively.
The sex split is equally stark (L/C/N): 62/24/12 for males and 68/19/13 for females.
No surprise that the Liberals are way ahead in the latest Abacus horse race poll.
No surprise the NDP have fallen and the Tories have held steady.
What you need to look at to understand what this means are the results for three Abacus questions.
While Paul Davis and the Conservatives were launching their official election campaign, Ryan Cleary turned up in a recorded interview on NTV to talk about the controversy he embodies.
The single biggest thing Cleary did was confirm that his answer to David Cochrane last week was a lie.
Did you discuss running in Virginia Waters-Pleasantville, David Cochrane asked Cleary for the second time.
“Absolutely not,” said Cleary clearly.
Yet there was Cleary not even a week later telling NTV’s Lyn Burry that – in fact – Cleary had talked to NDP leader Earle McCurdy about Cleary running in Virginia Waters instead of the current candidate Bob Buckingham. Cleary brought up the idea by questioning whether Buckingham could run a law practice and be a candidate at the same time.
Last Friday, CBC’s David Cochrane asked Ryan Cleary about information Cochrane had – apparently from NDP sources - that Cleary had tried to run in a district where the New Democrats already had a candidate.
They asked him specifically about Virginia Park-Pleasantville, where the NDP had already announced lawyer Bob Buckingham would be the star candidate for the party.
Cleary replied: “Absolutely not.”
That wasn’t true, as CBC’s Terry Roberts confirmed on Wednesday.
The news release on the government’s generic offshore royalty wasn’t exactly a model of clarity and accuracy.
The headline and first sentence referred to the announcement of a “framework.”
The first quote claimed that “establishing the enhanced generic offshore oil royalty regime” was an achievement for the current administration.
The problem is that none of it is true.
The provincial justice ministry had to increase spending to put a new judge in the Provincial Court in Clarenville even though the caseload in the court didn’t justify the decision, government documents reveal.
Director of Public Prosecutions Donovan Molloy e-mailed then-deputy justice minister Paul Noble on September 6, 2014 about a news story in the Telegram. Finance minister Ross Wiseman told the Telegram that plans were in the works to appoint a judge in Clarenville.
Noble replied that he “literally and figuratively” had no idea what Wiseman was talking about.
But in another e-mail sent on August 28, Noble had asked assistant deputy minister Heather Jacobs and departmental controller Deborah Dunphy to “trace the evolution” of the issue. Specifically, Noble said he was trying “to unravel the details” about how many judge positions the department had and how much funding went with them.
“It boils down to why we cannot appoint a judge in Clarenville, which in turn is connected to” an issue the departmental censors blacked out.
Ryan Cleary didn’t become the punchline to any New Yorker cartoon at 3:00 PM last Friday afternoon.
Peg Norman and other local New Democrats may want to believe he did. But he didn't.’t
Norman laced into Cleary on Facebook Friday afternoon, calling Cleary’s decision to join the Tories “an indictment of Ryan's dishonesty and disloyalty.” and “the actions of a person who has absolutely no understanding of political ideology and is solely motivated by a narcissistic attempt to be on top."
All true, no doubt, but it was just as true when – as Norman acknowledges – she decided not to contest the NDP nomination in 2008 in favour of the NDP’s then-new star candidate. It isn’t Ryan Cleary’s fault that Peg and a bunch of others decided to welcome him with open arms as their asshole and are now feeling a bit like Richard Nixon in another joke.*.After all, Cleary is – as he truthfully said standing next to Paul Davis – exactly the same guy he was as a New Democrat.
Ryan Cleary’s score on the Determination of Arseholic Narcissism scale is entirely irrelevant to what is going on right now in provincial politics. To appreciate the political developments last week, look beyond the superficial.
Elections Newfoundland and Labrador released the 2014 party financial reports recently. That let’s us take a look at trends over the past five years.
The Conservatives have consistently been able to raise more money than both of their competitors.
That changed in 2013.
In 2014, the year of the Great Tory Leadership Disaster Part One and Part Two, cash deserted the Conservatives. They aren’t destitute, but their annual cash haul dropped by half in 2014 what it had been in 2013. And if you look at 2013, you can see it as lower than it had been for the previous three years..
Money is the fuel all political parties need. When the Tories talk bravely about a 21 seat strategy they know they are blowing smoke up a reporter’s ass when they know they have the sort of annual cash haul the Liberals had in 2011.
-srbp-
In preparation for the coming general election battle, the provincial Conservatives are digging in their headquarters within sight of the head waters of Shit Creek.
They are frustrated, as David Cochrane reports. They cannot lay a glove on Dwight Ball and the Liberals. As a result, “[w]e are going to be very aggressive,” a big Tory told Cochrane.
Like the Conservatives have been push-overs and pansies until now. Since 2001, the provincial Conservatives have been the most harshly partisan bunch of politicians Newfoundland and Labrador has seen since Confederation. Go back to the Bill 29 racket or the Muskrat Falls fight.
Heck, go back to the way they treated Tom Osborne. Ostracised within caucus and then when he left them, brutally abused by Steve Kent, Joan Burke, Kathy Dunderdale and the rest of the Conservative goon squad.
“A positive, optimistic, hopeful vision of public life isn’t a naive dream,” Justin Trudeau told Canadians after he won a truly historic victory in the October 19th federal general election. That victory, said Trudeau, “is what positive politic can do.”
“We beat fear with hope, we beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together.”
Premier Paul Davis spoke to the St. John’s Board of Trade on Tuesday. Earlier in the day he released another letter he’d written to Trudeau listing off Davis’ demands, things he wanted Trudeau to give the province as soon as possible.
The provincial government had problems dealing with the federal government, wrote Davis, as if he and his colleagues had absolutely nothing to do with creating those problems.
Davis complained about not having a federal cabinet minister from the province, as if Davis and his colleagues had absolutely nothing to do with creating that situation either.
“But with your election, we now have change,” wrote Davis.
And just to prove how Davis himself had nothing to do with change, he then proceeded to rattle off a list of demands.
Paul Davis and his cabinet were all smiles and chuckles last week at the election of a new administration in Ottawa.
Optimistic for the future.
Looking forward to a new relationship and all that.
Then came the issue if the tariff on ships of a certain size built outside Canada. The Conservatives are holding it out as a test of Justin Trudeau and his fellow Liberals. Forgiving the tariff would be a sign that things had changed in Ottawa.
The province’s largest public sector union met last week in St. John’s for its annual convention. They started out their first day with a speech from recently-elected boss Jerry Earle. The militant guy promised the union would militantly oppose any plan to turn public sector services over to the private sector.
The province’s NDP leader – Earle McCurdy - spoke to delegates on Thursday. McCurdy said for umpteen thousandth time this year, that he and his friends in the union party would also steadfastly resist any effort to privatize public services.
Friday was the day the union let the other two provincial party leaders say a few words. What happened next was amazing..
SRBP told you on Tuesday morning that the federal election did not bode well for the New Democrats and Conservatives in the province.
The Liberals are just better organized than the other parties. They can identify their voters, keep in touch with them, and get them to the polls far better than the New Democrats or the Conservatives. That’s how you win elections. And when you are that much better at it than all the others, the odds go up exponentially that you will get more and more seats than people might expect.
There’s way more to it than just the idea that the Liberals have a computer program that does today what we used to do on index cards. Campaigns converted to Excel and other spreadsheet programs back when personal computers first appeared.
Organization is also about how the parties collect information and what they do with it. The Liberals are light years ahead of the competition, as Monday’s results showed.
From Newfoundland Power’s rate application to the Public Utilities Board.
Uncertainty:
The interconnection to the North American grid is a transformative event for the electrical system that currently serves the island of Newfoundland. It also creates significant uncertainties for Newfoundland Power and the customers it serves.
How the costs of the Muskrat Falls development and the transmission systems necessary to create the interconnection will be recovered from Newfoundland Power’s customers is part of that uncertainty. The reliability of wholesale supply for the Company and, indirectly, Newfoundland Power’s customers after interconnection, is another part of that uncertainty. These matters will likely be considered by the Board over the next 2 to 4 years. It is already clear, however, that the interconnection as currently proposed will have significant potential consequences for the future cost and reliability of electrical service for Newfoundland Power’s customers. (pp. 1-6 to 1-7)
Nick Whalen killed a giant.
That’s the story of the 2015 federal election in Newfoundland and Labrador, bar none.
People told Whalen he was crazy to run against the popular NDP incumbent. No one gave him a chance. But Whalen wound up defeating the NDP heavyweight.
This is Craig Westcott’s editorial from The Pearl newspaper, reproduced with permission..
This is a tough column to write. Taking an editorial position in favour of one candidate over another when both have worked so hard in this election isn’t as easy as some partisans on either side might think.
My opinion is tempered by the experience of having run myself, back in 2008, when I didn’t stand a snot of a chance as the Conservative candidate in the federal election against the NDP’s Jack Harris, who had the full weight and force of Danny Williams’ popularity and provincial PC machine behind him.
As I said at the time, I ran not so much for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives as against Danny Williams’ ABC campaign and his bid to isolate Newfoundland even farther from the political mainstream of this country.
Two polls taken during the recent campaign showed Scott Andrews was losing in his old seat in Avalon.
| Decided and leanings | Mainstreet | MQO/NTV (October) |
| Liberal | 43 (37) | 31 |
| NDP | 19 (16) | 10 |
| Conservative | 14 (13) | 9 |
| Andrews | 19 (13) | 22 |
Number in brackets is decided only. UND = 17
The “undecided “in the Mainstreet poll was 17%. When Mainstreet probed them to find which way they were leaning, the numbers you got above came out the other end. The decideds only, without the leaning figures) is in brackets. NTV didn’t release the raw data.
The numbers in those polls shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. The Liberals turfed Andrews from the caucus over allegations of sexual impropriety. Andrews has talked around the issue but still hasn’t told anyone what happened.
As it appears, people aren’t interested in the issue. They aren’t interested because they have already made up their mind about Andrews. He is dead meat just as he has been dead since the Liberals turfed him from caucus. The campaign didn't change anything for him.
The rest of the field never mattered. You can see in these polls the fact the NDP has absolutely zero impact outside metro St. John’s. The Conservatives are pulling nine points in the most recent poll.
-srbp-
If the numbers from the Liberal campaign in St. John’s East are right, then New Democratic Party incumbent Jack Harris is in serious trouble.
Asked if which candidate they would vote for, the 1,000 respondents to the IVR survey conducted over 48 hours late last week picked Harris by one point over his Liberal rival Nick Whalen.
This would be remarkable on a number of levels, not the least of which is that Whalen is a relative unknown in politics. Harris, by contrast, first got elected in 1987. Whalen was 15 at the time.
Harris is a likeable fellow and his appeal cuts across party lines. That broad appeal is why he has won the two federal elections he’s been in by sizeable margins: 74% of votes cast in 2008 and 71% in 2011. That second huge victory shows that the internal feud within the Conservatives had nothing to do with his victory in 2008.
As the federal election winds down to the last day, the result is likely going to be nothing any of the pundits expected.
Okay, the election isn;t winding down for the parties. For them, it is winding up tighter than tighter, but for everyone else we are coming down to the end of things.
Anyway, even for the folks who will be working this weekend without much sleep, things now do not look anything like they looked at the start. more than two months ago.
Muskrat Falls will ensure consumers in Newfoundland and Labrador pay much higher electricity rates than they otherwise needed to pay.
The latest Nalcor estimate is that consumers in the province will see a 53% jump in rates between now and 2020, with rates hitting 19.8 as the project enters commercial production.
The information came in the reply by Nalcor officials to a question by Tom Baird. Here’s a screen cap of the portion he tweeted on Tuesday:
Double whammy there for Nalcor:
Bad enough. the 2020 date confirms recent projections from two different independent sources - via Uncle Gnarley - that Nalcor’s megaproject in Labrador is now two years behind schedule. There’s a very good likelihood the real date will be later..
Far worse, you now know you will be getting a massive - and entirely unnecessary - jump in electricity rates due to Muskrat Falls. The cost over-runs are just adding to the amount of the increased cost.
Nalcor’s official figures put the jump at 53% above your current charge For folks using 1500 kilowatt hours a month of electricity, you’d be looking at about another $100 a month.
Compare that to the “seven dollars” more figure Ed Martin was tossing around a couple of weeks ago when word of the last cost over-run and project delay hit the news. VOCM even used it in a headline on September 30:
Nalcor Expects Average Power Bill to Go Up About $7
Wrong!
The truth was that the seven dollar hike Martin was talking about was on top of several other Nalcor increased estimates that still didn’t account for the gap between where we are currently and where Nalcor’s estimates started. More on that below. Key thing here is that official Nalcor figures now put the rate increase at 53%.
Only problem is we can’t be sure Nalcor has its own figures right. Here’s why.
/What a difference 36 years makes.
There’s New Democrat strategist Robin Sears in a National Post piece complaining about the way the Liberal are running their guy named Trudeau in lots of situations that give him good visuals.
“He isn’t running to be a boxer or a canoeist, he’s running to be Prime Minister, which is a different set of credentials,” said Robin Sears, who spent several campaigns in the war room for former NDP leader Ed Broadbent.
Now jump back to 1979, courtesy of the National Film Board’s documentary about the federal election in which another guy named Trudeau figured prominently.
In 2004, Danny Williams fought for three months against a federal government decision that had been settled – at least for the federal government – earlier in the year as part of the usual budget cycle.
Williams got the money the federal government had allocated but won the domestic war for public opinion.
In 2007, Williams and his provincial Conservatives launched a second political holy war against the federal government’s budget decisions. Williams waged a much longer war, lost it, but was widely credited at home with a victory.
There were other similarities
At the heart of the ongoing civil war between Danny Williams’ provincial Conservatives and Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives is the claim by Williams that Harper broke his 2006 election promise on Equalization.
Williams wrote to each of the federal party leaders and asked the leaders to state their party’s position on Equalization.
Since people are wondering if Muskrat Falls really is still the cheapest way to make electricity for local use, let’s take a look at it.
The tale is actually very simple.
Nalcor argued that Muskrat Falls was cheaper than one alternative: an island system dependent on thermal generation using some sort of petroleum fuel like the heavy stuff burned at Holyrood.
Now that wasn’t true even in December 2010, as this SRBP post noted at the time. Even if you accept the contrived studies used in 2012 to justify Muskrat Falls, the massive cost increases for the project have made the Falls more expensive than the alternatives.
The only advantage Muskrat had over thermal (oil) was fuel and those prices have gone in one direction: down. Since you can build a new thermal plant near to the demand source, you wouldn’t need the expensive connections to the mainland. That all works for oil-fired generation and against Muskrat Falls.
Oil prices have plummeted in recent months and are forecast to stay low, Muskrat Falls’ only advantage is definitely gone.
Poof!
Last week, provincial fisheries minister Vaughn Granter held a news conference at a local restaurant known for its seafood dishes to announce that from now on, that restaurant and even ordinary consumers could buy fish.directly from a fisherman without facing any legal problems.
That may sound a bit odd to some people but truth be told the provincial government has for decades banned direct sales to consumers. Ostensibly it was based on concerns over public health but in truth it was just another way the government tried to control the hell out of the fish business.
Wonderful news.
But the really fascinating detail was buried away in Granter’s speaking notes.
The average consumer in Newfoundland and Labrador should expect to pay 51% more for electricity compared to their current rates once Muskrat Falls comes online, according to SRBP’s estimate. Nalcor figures available at the time of writing.the original version of this post suggested a rate increase of 51%.
A household that current pays $156 $179.25 a month for electricity (not including HST, basic charge or provincial rebate) will see their monthly charge increase by $94 $282 a month with Muskrat Falls included in 2020. Those calculations use Nalcor figures and current domestic electricity rates.
Former Premier Danny Williams, the man behind the project, dismissed the cost increases for the project as “mouse droppings” and nothing more than the “cost of doing business.”
Nalcor boss Ed Martin said last week that consumer prices would go up by an additional seven dollars a month due to the most recent increase. Martin didn’t explain that those calculations were merely the added costs from the latest increase added to Nalcor’s earlier forecast based on cost over-runs. What Martin also didn’t say was that Nalcor’s calculations started from an assumed price that was significantly higher than actual consumer rates at the moment.
Any oil company seriously interested in bidding on an exploration license offshore Newfoundland and Labrador isn’t likely to need the hyped presentation by the provincial government Thursday.
Exploring offshore is expensive.
Always has been.
Always will be.
Exploring beyond the 200 mile exclusive economic zone, in upwards of two kilometres of water, just makes the oil and gas all that much more costly. to find and more costly to produce.
The latest progress report shows that Nalcor had a productive summer, but an extrapolation by the researcher and writer JM of information in the latest progress reports points to first power from Muskrat Falls in September 2018 and full commercial power by the middle of 2019.
In at post at Uncle Gnarley, JM described the challenge facing Nalcor in 2015:
As correctly noted in the March 2015 oversight report the productivity improvements in Q2 2015 are essential to meeting the final milestone schedule. For the Muskrat Falls team, the summer of 2015 is really “make or break” for the project. They need to get the project back on track before the construction schedule is hampered yet again by another Labrador winter. Winter begins earlier in Labrador than it does on the Island. The project team knows this. The questions is this: is the productivity improving at a pace where the schedule can be recovered? [sic] If Nalcor have any hope for schedule recovery they must first start meeting their originally planned productivity targets. In the July 2014 schedule, they planned to complete about 6.7% of the project in Q1-2015. With all their mitigation measures, Nalcor should be looking for about 33% complete by the end of June.
New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair likely never imagined that an insult he threw at a couple of Parti Quebecois politicians in the Quebec National Assembly 20 years ago would come back to haunt him 2015.
Liberal candidate Nick Whalen likely never imagined that reminding Mulcair of the word he used – “Newfie” - would rob Mulcair of whatever coverage he’d hoped to get out of his campaign stop in St. John’s.
But it did.
Then the controversy over Mulcair’s remarks carried on for another two days as New Democrats whined and complained about the whole issue. That only served to keep it going.
And to make sure the story didn’t die, two national pieces - Colby Cosh (National Post) and Evan Dyer (CBC) – weighed in. Cosh and Dyer picked up on the context of the original comment and that’s where things stared to get really interesting.
Not surprisingly, Darin King has decided to leave politics after only eight years.
King is just the latest in a long line of pensionable Conservatives who have decided it would be better to quit politics now with a fat pension rather than risk sitting on the opposition benches for a few years.
If he is remembered at all, King will stand out among his colleagues in the current Conservative administration for two reasons.
A new high school has put the better part of a thousand young people on Topsail Road opposite a raft of fast food outlets and a major mall.
Young people will cross Topsail Road, a four–lane major thoroughfare in St. John’s. it is dangerous. Things will get more dangerous. City council is thinking about building a pedestrian walkway way over the street so pedestrians don’t have to cross at street level.
The pedway will be costly. Some people don’t like the cost and suggest that some other, far less expensive measures would do. Those people are wrong and here’s why.
hard to believe but it has been five years since Hurricane Igor ripped through Placentia Bay and into Trinity Bay.
What stands out most about those events today is the same as it was at the time.
First, the devastation was astounding in every respect.
Second, the resilience of the people affected by the disaster was amazing.
Third the capacity of senior government officials, politicians and bureaucrats alike, to polish their own knob without any justification remains as appalling in 2010 as it was at the time.
Tom Mulcair will not be coming back to Newfoundland and Labrador again during the current federal election.
He certainly won;t be coming back to visit Avalon and he will only be back if there is a sense that Ryan might actually have a shot at winning St. John’s South-Mount Pearl.
The only other reason he might come back is if he had a candidate in a fight for a seat. The latest poll from Mainstreet Research confirms what dedicated political analysts have known for some time: there is no race in Avalon. Liberal Ken MacDonald is miles ahead of any of his rivals.
The New Democrats are a distant second.
“Distant” means the Liberal candidate is out front by more than two to one either in decided voters or if you add leaning to the decideds.
Sometime late in the last century, Bloc NDP leader Tom Mulcair said something in the Quebec National Assembly about Newfies.
Mulcair apologised for the remark during his campaign stop in St. John’s on Sunday, and well he should
“Newfie” is a slur. Even if it is used by people from Newfoundland, the word is still offensive. In some sense, It conveys an attitude about the place as being one so destitute that people leave it in droves for a better life. In another sense, it conveys an attitude about the people as buffoons.
So Tom apologised and, as far as that goes, we should hear no more of it. What we should continue to discuss, though, is the rest of what Tom had to say.
The next provincial general election finishes on November 30, 2015.
Not the way you are used to thinking of it, right?
You think the election happens on that day because, traditionally, that’s the day when most people vote.
Thing is, voting takes place on several days and pretty much always has. In Canada, elections sometimes took weeks and months according to Elections Canada. The rules to determine who can vote also changed over time. Some elections in the 19th century had different qualifications for voters in different provinces.
Through all that, the basic goal of the election was the same: be the one who had the most votes in the ballot box when the elections officials counted them up.
As you look ahead to the fall election, the bigger political addicts among you are likely trying to figure out different aspects like how the parties might run the campaign.
We got a clue this week with the debate story. Apparently the front-runner Liberals never thought of forcing the media outlets to pool together and have one debate. Instead they took the requests one-by-one until they hit their quota of two. Anyone who came along after that, including the largest private radio network, were shit-out-of-luck.
The episode reveals a curious bit of Liberal political strategy but it made your humble e-scribbler think about a bunch of other calculations that we should likely all keep in mind.
Let’s look at the numbers.
The Liberals have decided to skip the provincial leaders debate sponsored by VOCM and the St. John’s Board of Trade.
The reason, according to Liberal leader Dwight Ball is that there is only so much time available, so the party has decided to go with the two television debates that will offer province-wide coverage.
Here are some questions that are begging for an answer…
There is a problem, apparently.
A very big problem.
In the current federal election, none of the federal party leaders have visited the province yet.
On Friday, three of the four major outlets in the province all carried some version of exactly the same story. For the quibblers, the Telly story appeared on Saturday but it had to be written at least the day before. In itself, that fact says much about the state of the news media in the province and it isn;t a good tale.
NTV had local candidates on Issues and Answers but included a reference to the absent party leaders in the set up. CBC has a commentary by Peter Cowan on its website about the issue. The Telegram story on the Great Void includes comments from Bloc-NDP incumbent Ryan Cleary for good measure. Only VOCM seems to have ignored this political bombshell.
Thursday was one of those days where you felt like you had dropped down the rabbit hole with Alice.
Or maybe had indulged a bit too heavily in some mind-altering substance.
There was Lorraine Michael on the radio complaining that Muskrat Falls would likely cause environmental problems through the release of methyl mercury. Let’s be clear: there is nothing we know about Muskrat Falls today on any subject that wasn’t known when Lorraine endorsed Muskrat Falls. Yet, there is Lorraine trying to make it sound like she never, ever supported this megaproject.
In June, SRBP used the CRA poll from the second quarter of 2015 as the basis for a bit of “what if” thinking.
Consider that the Liberals have dropped seven points in six months. The New Democrats are up seven in three months. Extend that trend forward to September. Then you’d have the Liberals down from 35 to 31.
The New Democrats, meanwhile, would move from 16 to 23. It isn’t unusual at all to see shift in votes during an election a lot larger than the one needed to close the eight point gap you’d have at that point between the NDP and the Liberals.
Guess what happened.
Orders in Council up to the end of August 2015, show that the cabinet has made on 13 appointments at the rank of deputy minister and assistant deputy minister since the beginning of the new calendar year.
That’s roughly on par with the changes made in 2014.
It’s dramatically short of the record 51 such appointments made in 2013 or the very high rates of turn-over in 2011 and 2012.
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Clyde Jackman is the latest provincial Conservative to quit politics.
That’s not surprising. He was supposed to go in 2011 but hung around to make sure the party didn’t have to make an serious changes in people or policies.
Jackman had a few colourful moments during his political career, not the least of which was his stint as fish minister. He scuttled an historic agreement to reform the fishery. Clyde and his colleagues couldn’t be arsed to spend money on it when they had all their cash tied up in other things.
Then there was the time Clyde and his colleagues couldn’t be arsed to fund an historic commemoration when Clyde was responsible for tourism.
Other than being part of the crowd that added more public debt to the back’s of provincial taxpayers than all the other administrations since Confederation combined, Clyde Jackman had a relatively tame political career compared to some of his colleagues.
Now Clyde is retiring. Not surprising really. In 2011, he barely scraped back into office in a situation where his party didn’t face huge opposition. Clyde wasn’t alone. Lots of his colleagues kept their seats by only the thinnest of margins. it’s only when you look at the numbers that you realise how just close the Conservatives came to losing in 2011. It wouldn’t have taken much,.
Good bye and good luck, Clyde.
Enjoy the grand-kids.
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The federal and provincial governments need to sort out a royalty regime for the areas of the seabed outside the 200 mile exclusive economic zone.
Wylie Spicer of McInnes Cooper has pointed this out in a new paper from the University of Calgary public policy school..
SRBP pointed this out in 2009, at the time of a significant discovery that might have commercial potential.
SRBP pointed it out again earlier this year when the notorious scoff-law Paul Davis said he wanted to get a development going outside the 200 mile limit without having publicly addressed the issue of the new royalty regime. He had started talking about a new royalty regime, apparently, but was keeping it a secret.
Maybe now that someone from Calgary has pointed out this deficiency someone will notice the problem and do something about it.
Maybe it is something one of the political parties in the province would like to bring up during the provincial election.
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On Tuesday, the provincial Conservatives launched their election campaign.
It was to be built solely on the image of Paul Davis as a great leader. They labelled the campaign Davis 15. The revamped the party website and they launched a second site – with the clever address davis15.ca – that included videos by and about Paul.
One of the videos included an endorsement from a police officer who, as it turned out, received a promotion last spring from sergeant to inspector. Only a short while before he had been a constable.
The word that comes to mind when you look at the new provincial Conservative party website or the davis165.ca site isn’t fresh, new, rebounding, or even trying.
It is “alone”.
You see lots of pictures of Paul Davis.
By himself.
The New England governors and eastern Canadian premiers were in town on Monday for a quick meeting.
The only thing that seemed to make local news was talk about electricity sales. This is old hat for regular readers, but it is worth going over again.
New England wants to buy electricity. They can get lots of it very cheaply thanks to shale gas lately. How cheaply, you may wonder? Well, in August it was running around four to five cents a kilowatt hour wholesale, not including transportation.
To put that in Muskrat Falls perspective, it is less than half the cost of making electricity according to the estimate five years ago. Where the price is these days is anybody’s guess.
There are times when you have to wonder if provincial cabinet ministers actually realise how moronic they sound to everyone else.
David Brazil is the transportation minister. By his own admission, a company in Romania could build ferries for the ferry system in Newfoundland and Labrador for a better price than anyone else.
That better price included – by his own claim – if the provincial government had to pay a multi-million penalty on the project under federal tariff law.
NDP leader Earle McCurdy called the province’s major open line show on Thursday and by the sounds of things he hasn’t backed off the position that the size of the government’s financial problems will mean more cuts.
Sure he said he was opposed to austerity, but what Earle did say was that the government will have to cut jobs, lay people off and slash spending to cope with its financial problems.
Potato, potato, Earle.
“All options are going to have to be considered I guess, from both the revenue and the expenditure side, to make the best of a challenging situation,” NDP leader Earle McCurdy told CBC on Wednesday.
“All options” includes more job cuts, spending reductions, and public sector layoffs in addition to higher taxes.
That endorsement of “austerity” as a serious option is a radical change of direction for the provincial Dippers,. Up to now, they’ve been adamantly opposed to any cuts to public spending no matter how bad things got.
There’s something a bit surreal about the news this week.
Well, not really the news itself, so much as the way people are reacting to it.
The drop in oil prices and the forecast decline of jobs in Newfoundland and Labrador are not anything people haven;t heard before.
And yet people seem genuinely shocked.
Let’s understand, there is absolutely nothing – not a single thing – about any of this information that didn’t come with plenty of warning.
Does anyone really take Wade Locke seriously anymore?
Really?
Do they?
Go back to last October to see why.
The next time reporters have Wade on camera, give him a spoon to bend with his psychic ability.
Wade might just be able to do it. God knows he sure can’t figure out energy pricing and sound economic policy..
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Most of you have probably never heard of a fellow named Alonzo John Gallishaw.
John Gallishaw is best remembered in his native land for his brief service in the Newfoundland regiment during the Great War. Wounded at Gallipoli, Gallishaw was invalided out of service and eventually went back to the United States. Born in St. John’s in 1890, Gallishaw had been in the United States at the time war broke out. He was studying English at Harvard University, of all places.
He took up a teaching appointment and after the Americans entered the war, Gallishaw enlisted in the American Army in January 1918. He took a commission and went to France as part of the American expeditionary force That was Gallishaw’s hat-trick since he had enlisted briefly in the Canadian army on the war to Newfoundland in 1915.
A couple of years after his war with one prime minister, Danny Williams was locked in another war with another federal first minister.
Williams was demanding compensation for yet another supposed injustice.
“What I said before and I said going in, this is about principles,” Williams told reporters in November 2007 “but it's also about money as well. At the end of the day, the promise and the principle converts to cash for the bottom line ….”
The pattern set in 2004 was repeating itself.
The story of the 2004 war with Ottawa is the story of disconnects, mismatches, incongruities, of things that just didn't add up.
October 2004 is a good example. In the middle of the month, Loyola Sullivan, the provincial lead negotiator, went to Ottawa for a meeting with federal finance minister, Ralph Goodale. he headed the negotiations for the federal government in the effort to find a draft agreement.
Sullivan told reporters the chances of a deal looked good. The two governments were talking about something that would last eight years and bring the provincial government between $1.4 and $2.0 billion depending on the price of oil.
At exactly the same time, Premier Danny Williams was telling reporters the provincial position had not changed. "There are no movements from the government of Newfoundland and Labrador,” Williams told Rob Antle of the Telegram on October 16. “There's no doubt about.that. We have no intention of moving.”
On June 4, 2004, Danny Williams delivered a keynote speech to delegates at the oil and gas conference organized annual by the association that represented offshore service and supply companies.
“Newfoundlanders and Labradorians should not support any candidate or any party in the upcoming federal election” he said, “that does not clearly and unequivocally provide us with a commitment to keep 100 per cent of our provincial revenues under the Atlantic Accord.”
The day after Williams’ speech, Martin was in St. John’s as part of his election tour of Eastern Canada. Martin told the CBC that in an early morning conversation with Williams, “I have made it very clear that the proposal that he has put forth is a proposal that we accept."
New Democratic party candidate Linda McQuaig caused a bit of a stir in the first week of the federal election campaign when she said that in order to meet the national carbon emission reduction targets, we’d likely have to leave most of the oil sands oil in the ground, undeveloped.
Writing in the Toronto Star on Tuesday, Seth Klein of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said the reaction to what he called McQuaig’s “innocuous and true statement” is just further evidence that “our politics do not allow for serious — and truly honest — discussion of the most pressing issues of our time.”
Klein then decries the fact that all sorts of politicians from all sorts of parties are not embracing all sorts of policies that Klein thinks are not just good ideas but absolutely correct ones. Therefore, our politics is bad.
Well, it isn’t actually.
Labrador economy must diversify to survive, say opposition parties.
There is a CBC headline to conjure with.
Pure political magic for the two parties promising something different from what has gone on before.
Liberal leader Dwight Ball told CBC that we “must look at the other advantages that we would have available to us, things like power.”
"This government talks a lot about the export of power. I want to talk about using that power as a competitive advantage for us."
Lorraine Michael, for the New Democratic Party, said that "Government has to have long term plans that will deal with helping communities and workers when the issues arise." Michael thinks that we have been too dependent on private sector corporations in Labrador.
No one has ever heard those ideas before
The Telegram has been running a series this week on the number of communities in the province where people can’t drink the water supplied by their local municipality.
Regular readers will know the issue as it first came up here in 2009, in 2011, and in 2013.
A couple of years ago, CBC was highlighting the problem. Your humble e-scribbler reminded the universe that giving people water fit to drink was one of those fundamental commitments the Conservatives made to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2003.
And it was one of those fundamental commitments that they failed utterly and completely to honour.
There is no greater fraud than a promise not kept, their leader used to say.
He was absolutely right.
Not so very long ago, provincial Conservatives were crowing about how they would be running all sorts of mining projects in Labrador using electricity from Muskrat Falls.
These days, the word from Labrador isn’t all that good. One mine is closed and, on Tuesday, things looked bad both for the major mine operating in western Labrador and the KAMI project.
No one can take an glee in the bad news. What we should do is remember that the assumptions on which the Conservatives spent heavily over the past decade were completely inconsistent with about a century and a half of experience with resource extraction industries years in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Rather than learn from our considerable, collective experience, the Conservatives arrogantly assumed they alone knew better than everyone else.
They didn’t.
We all get to pay the price.
Oh joy.
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It should be.
Blake examines:
Resettlement gets two chapters, one before 1965 and one for the period afterward. Likewise, offshore oil and gas gets two chapters, the second focussing on the period between 1979 and 1985.
Blake examines the relationship between the province and the federal government in the context of Canadian federalism and, specifically, through the lens of executive federalism. That is, he frames the discussion as one focussed primarily on the relationship between the individual first ministers. There are sound reasons for doing this. Blake describes his reasons for doing so and puts the book in a general theoretical framework in a crisply written introduction.
Cast your mind back to April 2007
In his ongoing penchant for fighting with everyone and for small-mindedness, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams decides he will only refer to the new Prime Minister as “Steve”.
Williams made no bones about the fact his decision was very personal and intended to be insulting.
The first English debate is over.
Here are some quick observations to help you cut through the huge amount of noise coming from the conventional media.
Debate host Paul Wells showed why he’s one of the best political journalists in the country. Read his opening column on the campaign, in case you missed it.
As for the party leaders, here it is in the short form:
Stephen Harper
Looked and performed like Stephen Harper, the guy who has been prime minister for the past decade.
His weak spot was the senate. He wasn’t clear on the party policy. When discussing who controls senators, Harper admitted his gang are puppets. You can say the same thing of the senate that Harper said of the Bloc-NDP position on a sovereign Quebec: who the frack wants to bring THAT up again?
Other than that, steady as she goes.
What was most remarkable about the PM was that he was the same old steady-as-she-goes guy. For his folks, that is reassuring. For his opponents, that’s a bad thing since it means none of them managed to get a knife edge under his armour and expose a bit of flesh to chew on.
Thomas Mulcair
Three words: smug, uncomfortable, robotic.
Having not watched much of Mulcair in the House, your humble e-scribbler now understands that conventional media journalists who praise his sharp debating skills or his strong style are on something.
Not onto something.
On something.
Seriously.
Weak moment: What’s your number?
The alliance with Bloc supporters is Mulcair’s greatest liability. Both Trudeau and Harper took turns savaging the Bloc-NDP leader and he handled all of it badly. They will return to this again and again in English Canada. Mulcair cannot run from it, as much as he clearly wants to. Without that huge base in Quebec, Mulcair is just another small party leader with a beard.
To go with that strategic problem, you had a really clear tactical blunder: Whoever told Tom to recite “What’s your number?” should be shot. It made him look condescending, and that’s the most generous thing you could say about it. The fact Mulcair set Trudeau up for his highly quotable riposte mirrored the way the NDP strategy is playing neatly into the federal Conservative agenda.
Funny moment: when he slipped in the line about standing with Jack Layton. It looked scripted and desperate at the same time. Expect to see Mulcair ditch his own wife for campaign appearances with Olivia Chow by his side and lots more references to Layton, the Dipper Ronald Reagan.
Mulcair’s strongest moments were on the economy, which is also where Harper was the weakest. Reciting economic stats. Nerds got wood. No one else did. This could have been the spot where Mulcair shone.
Could have been.
Elizabeth May
Give her some rest and you have by far the strongest performance of the night, overall. May spoke clearly, intelligently, and succinctly about her party position. She did the same when going at the other four over theirs.
Weakness: prefacing every comment with “all due respect”.
At best, it was tedious. At worst, it was transparently passive aggressive.
Given Mulcair’s evident discomfort and May’s strong performance, don’t be surprised if the Bloc-NDP start shying away from other debates. Bloc-NDP support is notoriously soft. The Greens could bleed NDP support in the west. If May performs like this again and again, that could erode the Dipper position in some close races. They’ll want to hide their man away and let him only appear in tightly scripted moments as they did on opening day of the formal campaign.
Justin Trudeau
He showed up with his pants on, the right way around.
The Conservatives lowered expectations of Trudeau to the point that his performance will surely help change perceptions of him in key ridings. The Cons might want to rethink that strategy.
Weak point: the closer. Ugh. Did he end? or wait. There are a couple of words I forgot. Let’s. stumble.
Strong point: my number is nine.
A scripted line drilled into the candidate’s head. The boys and girls in the Grit backroom did their oppo in spades or have a spy in the Dipper debate camp. They anticipated the NDP line and gave Justin a rejoinder he delivered with consummate skill. It was probably the only quotable moment of the night in a debate that was surprisingly devoid of the quotable one-liners we are used to.
Trudeau isn’t out of the woods on credibility yet but his debate performance was a step in the right direction.
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Pierre Karl Peladeau won’t say yes or no to development of Old Harry, according to ledevoir.com.
Le Devoir interviewed the Parti Quebecois leader during a recent visit to the Magdalen Islands. Peladeau refused to endorse a moratorium on development, a move favoured by the islands fishermen who are concerned about the potential economic and environmental damage that could result from a major oil spill. Peladeau said the issue of a moratorium needed more study.
Peladeau insisted, however, that any decisions about Old Harry belonged solely to Quebec. He criticised the recent introduction of a bill in the National Assembly that would enable Quebec to establish a joint management board like the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board.
“If the Gulf is in federal jurisdiction,” Peladeau told Le Devoir, “recall that it is Ottawa that sets fish quotas. In an independent country, the question would not arise.”
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Updated
If you want to get a really good summary of the contending election strategies at this early stage of the federal campaign, read Evan Solomon’s piece at macleans.ca.
It’s simple, concise, and – from the feel of it – informed by conversations with people who know what is going on. That sets Solomon apart from a lot of media types who write “analysis” pieces.
The Conservatives strategy has been to drive Trudeau’s numbers down so that Mulcair rises. So far so good. While Solomon considers this a risky strategy for Harper, all you have to do is look at the New Democrats to see it could be a very effective idea.
It’s one of those persistent comments.
You don’t hear it or see it every day but, once in a while it comes back.
Like in 2013 . Some guy used the discussion about access to in formation – specifically rescinding Bill 29 – to wonder if we might be able to rescind the supposedly anti-democratic referendum on denominational education.
That’s actually the most common term in that letter to the editor:
On the first working day during August, 2015, the provincial government issued four news releases.
Two announced funding from the spring budget.
The other two warned reporters of two more funding announcements to be made on the second working day in August.
Corporate Research Associates will be in the field very soon.
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Anyone surprised by the news isn;t paying any attention to local politics at all.
Ross Wiseman has his pension. It cannot get any fatter. He likely won’t get re-elected in the November general election and even if he does, Wiseman has no interest in sitting on the opposition benches now that he has been in government.
15 years is long enough, sez Ross, so he won’t be running in the next election.
For those who are shocked and for the entertainment of the rest here are three moments from Ross’ political life over the past 15 years.
There are plenty of signs that the federal Conservatives will start the official campaign for the fall election earlier than scheduled. Earlier being as soon as Monday, rather than the usual federal campaign period of five or six weeks before polling day on October 19.
You’ve got to call it the official campaign because the fixed election date has meant that parties engage in an unofficial campaign months before the official campaign starts. All the Conservatives will do – if they drop the writ on Monday – is trigger some particular election rules and get the open warfare started a bit earlier than usual.
In Newfoundland and Labrador, the early federal election will have a significant impact on the provincial election due in November. We are not talking about the strain on campaign volunteers. We are talking about public attention and money.
People thought that meant the Tories would do away with the practice of stuffing people into fat government jobs based solely on their political connections.
And so the Conservatives proved they were different by appointing failed candidate Joan Cleary to run the Bull Arm Corporation. Cleary had absolutely no relevant experience, but they owed her some pork and so she got the high-paid job.
In the late 1990s, the provincial government faced some tough financial times. The debt and the size of the economy were the same number. The government went through the usual rounds of layoffs and cuts, and the sorts of things they needed to keep the budget under control.
One of the things government did to help deal with the financial state was to get rid of a batch of provincial parks that it had built up since the development of the provincial roads system in the 1960s. They weren’t parks in the sense of the national systems in Canada or the United States. They were campgrounds and picnic sites.
In 1997, they billed the 21 sites as “business opportunities” for private sector or local not-for-profit groups. By the end of the year, they’d manage to get rid of the lot. “These parks were made available to the private sector, tourism minister Sandra Kelly told the House of Assembly, “because they offered viable business opportunities for rural Newfoundland. Government also realized that it no longer needed to play as large a role in the recreational camping industry as it once had in the 1970s.”
Recreational camping industry.
Heading into an election and with the three major federal parties within five or six points of each other in the opinion polls, the Prime Minister has decided that this is the time to talk about reforming the senate.
Stephen Harper said last week that he will not make any more appointments to the senate. His plan is to create a crisis and then either reform the senate or abolish it in the ensuing melee among and with the provincial premiers.
The New Democrats are flattered. They have already advocated abolishing the senate altogether. This is a popular idea in Quebec where the NDP are threatened by the resurgence of the Bloc Quebecois. The NDP won its current status as official opposition in 2011 with a surprising haul of seats in the province as the Bloc vote collapsed and its supporters looked for a politically friendly home.
The sovereignists found a welcome embrace from the NDP. To the extent that anyone else in the country thinks about the senate, it is likely only as the object of derision given the recent scandals over spending. Few have thought through the implication of the NDP plan. In Newfoundland and Labrador, for example, it would cut in half the province’s representation in Ottawa.
For some time now, Nalcor has needed an extra line from Bay d’Espoir to increase the capacity across the Isthmus of Avalon.
They just kept finding excuses not to install it.
In January 2014, Nalcor chief executive Ed Martin told CBC’s Ted Blades that the line would be the most expensive option with additional generation on the Avalon being more cost-effective. Nalcor’s analysis, according to Martin, showed there was no justification for the extra line.
From the Financial Post, Tom Adams and Ed Hollett take a look at three issues that will hold up any development of Gull Island:
While Gull Island might have a modest edge over Muskrat Falls’ cost per unit of production due to its greater size and less challenging local geology, it’s highly doubtful that Nalcor would be able to offer Gull Island electricity at Ontario prices that are remotely competitive. That is, not without massive subsidies from somewhere.
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:
If nothing else, media coverage about energy talks between Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador shows just how much people don’t know about what is going on in the country.
Not a crowd for half measures, the National Post ran a story on Monday morning that was rife with basic factual mistakes. They even started the piece with a statement that had two facts in it, both of which were simply not true.
“Ontario is the latest customer to line up to purchase Newfoundland and Labrador’s growing supply of hydroelectricity…”
Ontario and the faltering Conservative administration in Newfoundland and Labrador are talking about the possibility of developing Gull Island to supply Ontario with renewable energy.
CBC’s online story on Monday said exactly that:
Ontario eyeing Lower Churchill hydroelectric power from Labrador.
But if you listen to what grim-faced energy minister Derrick Dalley said to CBC’s David Cochrane during the supper hour news on Monday, there is a lot less to the announcement than first appeared.
Black women in the United States are twice as likely to die as a result of complications of pregnancy and childbirth as are white and Hispanic Americans, according to new research. The story turned up in The Economist over the weekend.
But there’s more.
The United States is one of only eight countries globally to see its maternal mortality rate head up in decade 2003 to 2013..”American women are now more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as their counterparts in Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany or Japan,” according to The Economist.. The overall American rate of maternal death is 18.5 for every 100,000 live births.
Seven companies in Newfoundland and Labrador have reached a deal with Elections Canada in the Penashue illegal contributions case.
According to Canadian Press, the companies have reached an agreement with Elections Canada in which the companies admit to making illegal contributions and promise not to do so again.
“Executives of Air Labrador Ltd., Dee-Max Innu Tautshuap Ltd., Innu-Chiasson Construction Ltd., Kakatshu Construction Ltd., Labrador Sales Ltd. and N.E. Parrot Surveys Ltd. admit they directed their companies to donate $1,000 each to Penashue’s campaign.
The CEO of Pennecon Ltd. [the seventh company] admits that six of his company’s officers were involved in sending Penashue’s campaign a $5,500 corporate cheque.”
Federal election finance laws prohibit corporations from making political donations.
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